


In a Forest, Dark and Deep

by Miss_M



Category: Dog Soldiers (2002)
Genre: Creepy, Dark, Family, Fever, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pack Dynamics, Pre-Canon, Scottish Character, Transformation, With A Twist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 08:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26849107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: After something in the forest attacks her, Megan is nursed by a kind family in an isolated glen.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	In a Forest, Dark and Deep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [escritoireazul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/gifts).



> I own nothing.

The pine trees, olive and grey in the dawn light, were twined with tendrils of fog. The sky promised more drizzle, and the earth on which Megan lay was but thin topsoil, she knew. Underneath it, the hard gneiss of the Highlands’ bones ran deep. 

Her heart beat very softly, and she was very cold, yet her cheeks felt flushed and hot. Her teeth were chattering. Her blood-soaked sleeve stuck to her arm. 

The naked young man who crouched over her touched her wounded arm and said: “Tis ainlie a scratch.” 

He lay down on the ground alongside Megan and put his arm over her. She tried to roll away but couldn’t. Her body felt sapped of all energy, and she was _so cold_. 

“Shhhh,” the young man soothed her. “Tis ainlie tae git ye warm. Then ah will take ye home tae mother.”

*

When next she woke, she was in a bed, under a heavy eiderdown, her feet sweating next to a hot-water bottle. A woman with a kind, weathered face was mopping her brow. 

She smiled when she saw Megan open her eyes. “Back wi’ us, are ye? Tis all right. There’s some pain at foremaist but ye’ll be braw by tomorra.”

She stood, gathered her cloth and washbowl, and turned away, so that Megan almost didn’t catch her last, muttered comment: “They aye are.”

*

But Megan didn’t feel better on the morrow, nor the day after that, nor any day of the weeks that followed. Her fever spiked and ebbed. She slept for most of the day, ate the meat broth the woman brought her, and used an old porcelain chamber pot when she needed to, for she could not manage the length of the passage to the bathroom and didn’t want to be helped on and off the toilet. Her head was always pounding, as with the worst PMS migraines she sometimes got.

The woman, Mary, the matriarch of the Uath family, nursed Megan without complaint, but Megan caught her sometimes watching her charge like Megan was an atypical specimen under a microscope, a test subject that troubled her. An outlier. 

“Ah dinnae ken what to tell ye, lassie,” Mary told her one day, after giving Megan a sponge bath. “Ah think mebbe tis fur ‘twas the last night o’ the stowed oot moon ‘n’ that’s how come tis taking sae long.”

“I don’t understand,” Megan said. She felt even more wretched than usual that day. 

Mary finished changing the bandage on her arm (surely, Megan thought, she’d been with the Uaths long enough that she shouldn’t need a bandage any longer? Her arm should have started healing, yet it didn’t feel infected) and patted her hand. “Dinnae worry. Just a few mair days, then we’ll see what we see.”

*

The only times Megan saw the other members of the family – all men – was when Mary’s laconic husband, John, brought up Megan’s tray or took away her bedsheets to be washed. The three sons kept their distance, only peeking in through the open door sometimes while Mary changed the dressing on Megan’s wound or talked to her to pass the time.

“They dinnae mean any harm,” Mary said one day, after shooing away the one who’d found Megan in the wood and brought her to the house. “Don’t be feart o’ them.”

“I’m not afraid,” Megan said, though privately she wondered if she should be. Three young men living with only their parents in an isolated glen… “I’d like to thank Sean – that’s his name, isn’t it? – for saving me.”

Mary again gave her one of those quizzical, assessing looks of hers, which Megan was starting to resent, despite knowing she should be grateful for the Uaths’ extended hospitality.

“Ye’ll meet them soon,” was all Mary would say on the subject.

*

Megan did meet all three Uath boys on the first night of the next full moon. Lachlan, the eldest, fetched her from her bed and carried her downstairs and out to the barn; Sean showed her the straw pallet they’d prepared for her, the hunk of raw meat, the pail of fresh water; Andrew, the youngest, shut and barred the barn door once they’d laid Megan down on the straw in the icy barn, dressed in nothing but Mary’s old nightie, her feet bare.

She begged them not to do this, whatever this was, but they avoided her eye and wouldn’t speak to her. Mary and John were nowhere to be seen. 

Megan was too weak to do much more than crawl across the barn floor and rattle the door, to no avail. Her toes and fingers were already turning numb with cold. She would die there, and she wouldn’t even feel it coming. 

But she didn’t die, and she did feel everything that happened to her next: a new strength, a surging rage, her heart deafening her with its drumbeats as it seemed to expand inside her, her senses augmenting everything till she felt like she was drowning in sensations. The rustle of a mouse in the straw sounded as big as an elephant crashing through the wood; the scent of the raw meat taunted her with its remaining juices, its lack of freshness; the rustle of the pines, the rush of a mountain river a mile away, the sleeping breaths of humans at a campsite a few miles beyond that.

And the pain – bigger than anything Megan knew existed. Pain in her bones, her tendons, her bloodstream. Pain which crunched her up and swallowed her whole. 

She writhed on the floor of the barn, her talons gouging the floorboards, and howled. 

*

Mary stood beside Megan’s bed again, holding out a mug of tea. 

“Git that doon ye then come doon tae breakfast,” Mary said, smiling at Megan. “It’s aboot time ye met everybody properly.”

Megan’s body still ached, but it was a sepia memory of pain, an afterthought of her agony in the barn. She wore a different nightie, and there was neither bandage nor scar on her arm. She sat up in bed without needing to be helped. “What did you do to me, all of you?”

Mary watched her, the troubling outlier, but something was different about Mary’s expression now: she seemed less concerned or pitying than resigned. “Sean ainlie gave ye a scratch,” she said. “Ah made sure o’ that.”

She offered Megan the mug. Megan made no effort to take it. Mary tutted and bent and placed the mug on the bedside table.

“ _You_ made sure?” Megan barked.

Mary straightened up and favored Megan with a look as stark as Highland gneiss – the kind of look one gave an intimate, but not an equal.

“Ah aye wanted a daughter,” Mary said.

**Author's Note:**

> at foremaist - at first
> 
> braw - fine
> 
> aye - always
> 
> ken - know
> 
> stowed oot moon - full moon


End file.
